By Visiva – visiva.ch
Every entrepreneur who's worked with a communications agency knows the process. Initial meeting, great enthusiasm, presentation with slides (perhaps too many). Then comes the account manager: the person who's supposed to act as a bridge between the company and the client.
and the creative department. From that moment on, every request goes through a filter. A briefing becomes an email, the email becomes a meeting, the meeting generates a document, and the document comes back with the corrections. Updating a brochure takes three weeks and four calls.
At that point, the entrepreneur thinks two things in quick succession. The first: of course I need someone to manage communications professionally, because I don't have the time. The second: but not like this, not with this timeframe.
The problem has specific roots. The traditional agency model was created to manage clients with large budgets and annual communication plans. The account, in that context, makes sense: it coordinates campaigns, manages suppliers, and maintains
Putting together the pieces of a complex puzzle. But most companies in Ticino don't fit that category. They are businesses with dozens, sometimes hundreds, rarely thousands of employees. They need to communicate well but lack the scale or structure to justify such an organization.
The result is an uncomfortable middle ground. The entrepreneur knows he needs external expertise, but the market model is too large for his needs. So he makes do: he creates the LinkedIn post himself, asks his nephew to update the website, and entrusts the catalog to the printer who "also does the graphics." The result is unprofessional, the results aren't forthcoming, and the company's image (and revenue) suffers.
The blind spot of the classic model
There's one aspect that's rarely discussed. A company's communications activities aren't all the same, and treating them as if they were is the traditional model's ultimate mistake.
Some tasks are operational and recurring: updating website content, preparing a presentation for a trade show, adapting an ad for the local press, publishing a post. These are activities that require executive skill, speed, and a
Minimal briefing. The entrepreneur knows what they want, and they need someone who can make it happen quickly and well. Adding an account to this process adds costs and slows down the process without improving the outcome.
Other activities are of a different nature. Defining the company's positioning after a generational transition.
Rethinking B2B communications when entering a new market. Deciding whether and how to communicate an acquisition. This requires analysis, strategy, and discussion. You need someone who knows the company, the industry, and the competitive landscape and can translate all of this into coherent communication choices. In short, you need an account manager. A good one.
A model that adapts
The solution is a hybrid approach, and the fact that it is little discussed is probably due to the fact that it is not convenient for those who sell standardized packages.
It works like this: for operational activities, the client works directly with the executor. No intermediaries, no triplicate briefing documents. The entrepreneur sends the text, the graphic designer creates the layout, and the work is out. Timeframes are shortened, costs are reduced, and so is frustration.
For strategic decisions, a consulting professional comes in who has the time and expertise to discuss the situation with the entrepreneur. How many times a year? It depends on the company. For a Ticino SME operating in a stable market, three or four meetings a year may suffice, plus support during critical moments. For a company expanding or undergoing transition, meetings will be more frequent.
The economic advantage is tangible. A traditional account has a fixed cost that affects every single activity, including those where its intervention is superfluous. A hybrid model allows you to invest in strategic consulting when it's truly needed and pay for operational execution at its actual cost, without any additional overhead.
The question of trust
There's a frequent objection: without an account that coordinates everything, who guarantees consistency? The answer is that consistency doesn't depend on someone sorting emails. It depends on a clear, shared, and documented strategy. If the company has defined its positioning, its tone of voice, and its key messages, anyone carrying out the operational work can do so consistently. It's the upstream strategic work that holds the pieces together, not the intermediate step downstream. Corporate communication works when it combines operational autonomy and strategic depth. The problem is that most offerings on the market offer one or the other. Almost never both, in the right proportion. This is why the question agency and client should always ask themselves initially is: what is really needed?
